


All the Way Down

by Sholio



Category: Alliance-Union - C. J. Cherryh
Genre: Crash Landing, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Stranded
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-30
Updated: 2018-10-30
Packaged: 2019-08-05 17:05:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16371647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Downbelow Stationmissing scene/tag. When the Norway pulled out of Pell at the climax, her riderships were left behind. This is what happened to one of them.





	All the Way Down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [opalmatrix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/opalmatrix/gifts).



> This also fills my "vehicle crash" square in h/c bingo.

" _Norway's_ pulling out," Meg reported over internal comms, just another piece of data relayed to her crewmates from the boards; the reality of it caught up with her a second later, everything lagging because of her focus on the blips in front of her.

"What the effing hell?" (Ben.)

Sal cursed, and asked, "Moving on a jump vector?"

"Jump vector," she said, "affirmative --" Sending to Ben's boards as she spoke, those damning numbers, let him give them a _plan,_ god.

There had been no recall order from the carrier. Just a blip on the screen, blip with ID that meant _home_ , that meant _we made it_. Moving away, pulling out.

They knew it happened sometimes, of course. It had happened to other riders. Carriers got in trouble; captains had to make the brutally hard decision to abandon a handful of lives to save hundreds, thousands.

It had never happened on the _Norway_. No riderships lost in the carrier's history. That was rare. Luck had to turn sometime.

"Can't catch up," Ben said, "no chance, moving too fast -- _Damn it!"_

"Now what?" Sal said. " _Now_ what?"

"We do what we were trained to do and stay alive 'til come back for us," Meg said, cutting in on the incipient hints of panic in the _Freya_ 's cramped cockpit. From two of them, at least. Dek didn't say anything, hardly seemed to be tracking on it. Man was deep in pilot headspace. "We still got hostiles, got a damn lot of people out there shooting at us."

Hostiles she hadn't been tracking, damn it, letting herself get distracted with _Norway's_ exit, not doing her damn _job._ "Ben," she said, "numbers incoming, dumping to your boards now, give us a vector." _Tell us what to do._

It was a deliberate kick in the pants as much as a request, because Ben was frozen too, staring at his boards -- they all were. Going out in a fireball, okay, they were prepared for that every time they dropped through the hatch into the _Freya_ 's cockpit. But this ... _No different from an ordinary fight,_ she told herself. _No different._ "Ben! We got two riders tracking us, _Australia's_ , I think-- Give Dek a vector!"

Ben shook himself all over, and his hands raced across the boards, pulling data. "Okay, so what we do is, do a burn around the planet, skim their well, slingshot around with the planet for cover and come back the other way going fast enough they'll have a hell of a time getting a lock on us. Got that, Captain Moonbeam?"

"Risky." (Sal.) "Too much debris. Too damn _close_ to that gravity slope, cher."

"You got a better idea? _Fenris_ is running for the station to get cover that way, and looks like _Thor_ and _Odin_ had the same idea about the planet. Hell, _Thor's_ lower than we are, they're kissing atmo already. Keep 'em guessing, that's what we gotta do. Scatter and cover and wait to get picked up."

Dekker didn't need all that extra chatter taking him out of pilotspace, didn't need to know the reasoning behind what he'd just been told to do, but he wasn't paying attention anyway; he'd started the course-change burn as soon as Ben told him where to start it to, and Meg could feel it pushing her into her seat, painful pressure on joints that weren't as young as they used to be. _Why_ didn't matter to Dek; it never did, not with Meg feeding them numbers and Ben turning it into _where_ and _how fast._ There was only _now_ for Dek, when he had his hands on the boards, and nobody ever born could fly like that boy did when he had his head in the game.

"Incoming," Meg said, hearing her own voice calm and steady. They had a vector now. This was just combat. They'd been doing it half their lives. "On your six, Sal."

"Got it." All business, as if Sal hadn't just been arguing with Ben a moment earlier. "Brace. Gonna need to compensate for some missile kickback, Dek -- you hear me?"

"Yeah." Dekker's voice was dreamlike. _Deep_ in that headspace, Meg thought. Gonna have a hard crash later, back in quarters.

... if they got back to quarters, but no, she wasn't thinking that way -- hell! _Head in the game, Kady ..._

Things moved so goddamn fast out here. It still made her aware, sometimes, that the human mind was never meant to track at these speeds. This wasn't the worst they'd been through, they'd had firefights in asteroid-filled jump points that made this a cakewalk, but everything was just so close together this far insystem. A solar system, hell, you could skip across it in minutes at a high enough vee. And this was a mess: carriers and riders, station and debris, and the fuck-it-all planet making things even harder --

White light blazed on their screens, too damn close, missiles flaring against the planet's blue curve. Sal cursed, and then --

\-- and then her helmet was full of feedback, audio and visual. Meg's head snapped back and it took a minute for the sparks to clear from her vision, her head ringing. Things were spitting sparks, boards going all red and worse, gone dark, and her head, god --

"-- hell just happened?" Sal was yelling. "Ow! God! Someone _say_ something!"

"EMP," Ben said thickly. 

"What?" 

"From the missiles. Power surge must've fried a bunch of stuff, fed back into our suits -- _shit_ , my board's dead. Anyone got anything? Dekker?"

"He's out," Sal said, and that was what made Meg claw her way back from the red-tinted darkness edging her vision. If Dekker was out, they didn't have a pilot, and the gravity well -- _fucking hell_ \--

"Meg?" Ben shook her arm. "Meg!"

"On it," she gasped, through the splitting headache and the ringing in her ears. She tried to get her numb fingers to work the boards. Dek was out completely, limp in his restraints. She didn't want to think what that'd done to him. With the pilot headset giving him input from the ship itself, he must've taken the brunt of it. Didn't even know if he was alive or not. And there was no time to check.

They were completely out of control, gravity well had them in its teeth. Half the systems knocked out -- she fought to get full control transferred over to her board from Dekker's, but the damage was making it hard --

"One of you get in Dek's seat, see if you got anything at all on the main pilot boards," she snapped out. Not thinking, _not_ thinking about Dekker, ragdoll-limp when Ben, unbuckled and precariously, _dangerously_ standing up, leaned half into Dek's lap trying to get the controls working again. "Get it over to mine if you can."

"Everything's fried," Sal said, working frantically at her board. "Nothing on armscomp, nothing on comms --"

Gravity well staring them in the face. At least Pell wasn't like Jupiter, they _could_ survive this, if they could survive reentry in a ship that was never meant for it, not thinking of air they couldn't breathe, of a whole planet mostly unexplored with god only knew what out there in that alien wilderness -- "Ben, get buckled in, damn it, we're going down hard and you _don't_ want to be rattling around loose in here."

"Got it," Ben muttered, "got most of Dek's functions on my board now."

"I told you put it to mine!"

"Can't, not with you flying the ship, screw hell out of your inputs."

"God," she muttered. "Do we have trim jets, anything at _all?"_

"Working."

"What do you want me on?" Sal asked. Had a license, Sal did, but she probably hadn't flown since the Belt. Neither had Ben, god --

"I want you buckled in, is how I want you!"

Going down now, going into that gravity well with half the functions she ought to have -- but at least _some_ of it was coming back up now, red lights starting to flash green, and she finally got what Ben was doing: _not_ trying to fly the ship, but rerouting around the damage, getting as many of the main pilot functions back up as possible, and working it from the controls _he_ was used to rather than trying to do it on Dekker's unfamiliar boards.

Good crew. Good team.

God, let them survive this.

Those of them still alive ... but no, _not_ thinking about that --

It wasn't like knowing Dek's condition would make a damn bit of difference, given circumstances. Back on Norway, ops would be getting telemetry for the ridership's crew, but that didn't come through to _her_ controls, just went out to the carrier, and they surely had other things on their minds right now ...

"Sal, you got damage reports on your board now, at least you ought to --" from Ben.

"Got it, got it -- Meg, you're getting harder output on left-side thrusters than right, see if you can compensate."

"Doing." No voice for anything other than that. The ship fought her. They shuddered in the atmosphere like a ship tossed on rough water, lurching in their seats, g-forces all over the place. Planet -- water -- there _would_ be water down there, water and land. Better chance of surviving a landing in water, but less chance of surviving long-term. Hell, might not have enough control over their trajectory to make a choice, way things were going --

The rough entry shook Dek's limp body like a piece of laundry. He was still out, couldn't brace for it. 

"Man's gonna break his neck," Ben muttered. She wasn't the only one who'd noticed.

"Nothing we can do about it, cher." Hard, you had to be. Just do what needed doing. Worry about the rest later.

Blood on the company steps ...

And a red light on her board -- Ben had gotten more of the main-board functions over to her than she'd realized, not just the mission-critical ones. This one meant a loose seat restraint. "Ben --" she began, turning her head, vital attention diverted from her task. But it was Sal, crawling through what little space there was in the shaking cabin to wrap her arms around Dekker, seat and all, steadying him from behind.

"Break your arms," Meg snapped at her. "Break your _neck._ Get your restraints on, you know how many g's we'll be pulling on decel? You can't hold him, no one can. Rip your arms out of their sockets."

"You'll touch her down soft as a feather," Sal said. Helmet on; Meg couldn't see her face, could hear only that she was scared. "You always did."

God, and _she_ hadn't flown on main pilot boards since their Belt days. Copilot wasn't the same thing.

"Crazy," Ben muttered. "Every last mother-loving one of you. Flying with crazy people."

"Takes one to know one, cher," Sal said.

"Brace for hard decel," Meg ordered. "Ben, give me numbers, give me a mark." Jets that could turn on a dime in vacuum could also brake in atmo, whether meant for it or not. Just have to hope the ship didn't tear itself apart ...

Or tear Sal's arms off at the shoulders.

No different than bleeding off _v_ with controlled decel burns, coming in for docking. Tell herself that. Except atmo raised a whole new array of variables, thousands of variables, having to account for turbulence and _weather_ and, god, so many more things to hit, a planet was nothing _but_ things to hit --

"Mark!"

Burn. Like being kicked in the chest.

And boards going red, two jets out, same side -- another burn was going to put them in a spin --

"Mark, Meg, _mark_ \-- we gotta dump more speed or we're gonna be an effin' crater!"

Something came to her then, _old_ pilot folk wisdom from when she was flying shuttles in low Earth orbit, chatting over beers around the bar at Sol One. Turn the nose _up_ , hit with the belly, bleed off momentum that way. Like skipping a rock on a pond, back on Earth ...

"You hear me? Meg?"

Controls fighting her, but she fought back. Dizzying view forward, too much coming too fast to make sense of. Sky and ground and clouds, all blurred to incoherence with their speed. Green. Lot of green.

Impact.

 

***

 

Dark.

Blind?

No, Meg thought muzzily, power's out ...

She raised her hand and was confused for a moment when her gloved fingers brushed her helmet instead of her face. Her arm seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. Fingers moved, though. She fumbled with her suit controls, trying to get suit power on.

"Sal?" she said into the dark. Her voice came out thick and wet. "Ben ... Dek?"

No power. No comms. Just black, flat black. She was lying on her back in _g_ , at least that's what it felt like. Mouth tasted like copper. She coughed and wanted to spit but there was nowhere to do it. Not with the helmet on. And with comms down, she couldn't talk to anyone. She didn't _want_ to die alone in the dark ...

Hell. Better to save the suit air anyway, if the air in the cockpit was okay. Better than being alone. She fumbled with the seals, turned the oxygen flow off, and pulled off the helmet.

The air was chill and there was a faint scorched smell. Her lungs didn't feel like she was breathing Pell air, not that she knew exactly what that would feel like, but it couldn't feel good, and this was basically just air. She did sneeze, and pressed her hand to her nose, cursing softly. Nosebleed, definitely. The blood trickled down rather than floating. Strong _g._ Right. Planet.

"Any of you hear me?" She coughed. Everything hurt. Helplessly, she reached out in the dark. "Someone say something, _please_ ..."

There was a rustle from somewhere near her, and a muffled voice speaking inside a helmet. Meg's heart tripped over and started beating again. _Not_ just her. Not alone.

"Comms are down," she said. "Take your helmet off. The air's okay, breathable anyway. Copy that?"

Her own seat restraints brought her up short. She fumbled with the manual release for a moment before managing to get herself unhooked. Felt like the ship was tilted at an angle, the seat leaning steeply back. The dark was disorienting, throwing off her internal equilibrium.

There were faint rustlings from near her, and Ben's voice said thickly, "Sal? That you?"

"It's Meg. Don't know about Sal yet. I think you're the only one awake besides me."

"Hold on," Ben said, and a sudden finger of bright white light speared the darkness. Meg covered her eyes with her hand and tentatively peeked between her fingers, then lowered her hand as dark-adapted pupils shrank to accommodate.

Ben had managed to get his suit's helmet light on. Meg had forgotten they had them. Flight suits weren't spacesuits, didn't have all the same functions. But they had some. 

The light jittered: his hands were shaking. He set the helmet on the dead, dark board in front of him and turned it so the light was angled toward her. It seemed to spike right through her skull.

"Get that out of my eyes," Meg said, raising her hand again.

Ben rotated it a quarter-turn away. "You okay?"

"Bout as good as I could be. You?"

"Never better. Ready for a party." He fumbled with his restraints, fingers slipping off, and cursed. Meg pried herself shakily out of her seat to help. When she leaned over him to unclasp the restraints, he dropped his hands and let her -- good sign the man still wasn't tracking well, she thought. His hair, growing out of its last close crop, was a sweaty mess and bruises were visible through it, girdling his skull despite the helmet's padding. Concussion maybe, she thought.

"You want to see if you can get anything up on the boards?" she asked when she'd gotten him loose. "I'll see about the others."

Ben nodded, wordless -- bad sign, that -- and leaned forward, resting his hands on the board beside his helmet for a minute.

"How's the light come on?" Meg asked him, nodding to the helmet. The inside of the ship's cockpit was all shadows. Dek was on the other side of Ben, sagging in his restraints, and she couldn't see Sal anywhere in the dark.

"Side switch." Ben demonstrated.

Meg flipped hers on. Sal was crumpled behind Dek's seat. She needed to look at both of them, decided Sal was probably the worse off, getting thrown around the cockpit like that. Meg knelt beside her, set the helmet down, and started trying to get Sal's helmet off.

Sal came to life all at once, batting weakly at Meg. "Calme, tres calme," Meg told her, pulling off the helmet in a cascade of rattling braids. "Status, Aboujib."

Sal's status report was a string of profanity that would've made a Helldeck mech blush. Meg heard Ben's short laugh. 

Sal started to try to sit up, flailing weakly. Meg pushed her back down. "Stay still. You could have hurt your neck or back."

"Ow," was Sal's unhelpful response.

"What hurts?"

"Fuckin' everything," Sal muttered.

"Can you handle it for a minute? I gotta see about Dek." When she started to get up, Sal made another move as if to sit up. "And stay down!" Meg snapped, exasperated.

She moved on to Dekker, not wanting to know what she was going to find. He was floppy as a rag doll, his head lolling against her arm as she got the helmet off. The side of his face was dark with blood in the cold blue light of her helmet beam, soaked into his hair and crusted around his mouth and nose. His face was cool to the touch and blue in the helmet light. Meg held the back of her hand against his mouth and let out a shivering sigh when his breath tickled her skin.

"'s wrong with him?" Ben asked. He had the guts of the board pulled out, wires all over the place. His hands were still shaking. He wiped one across the back of his forehead, squinted, and picked up two wires again.

"I look like a med to you?" He needed to be lying down; she knew enough first aid for that. She struggled with his restraints. She'd gotten Ben's off fine. She didn't know why she couldn't get Dek's to work.

"Hey, Meg." Ben had turned to look at her. "What's wrong with your hand?"

"Nothing," she started to say, before noticing how two of the fingers on her right hand were jutting out at a weird angle in her glove. "... Oh." She rested a hip against the board. The deep ache in her hand and the weakness in her knees seemed to come out of nowhere, as if it hadn't existed until she'd seen her fingers twisted at that wrong angle.

Ben sighed and turned, hooking his leg under him to sit sideways in the chair; the cockpit seats didn't pivot. With gentleness she rarely saw in him, he carefully helped her peel off her glove. The last two fingers of that hand were swollen and already turning colors. She must have rammed it into the board when they hit.

"Shit," Meg said, looking at it. "You know anything about setting broken fingers?"

"Do I look like a med to you?" he echoed.

"Smart mouth on you, boy. Give me some help here."

Between the two of them (Ben listing sideways, that head injury was doing him no favors) they got Dekker out of his seat and lying down. Sal had managed to get herself sitting up by that point, propped on the side of the cabin like a puppet with cut strings and ignoring Meg's dirty look.

"Wreck your spine, it's no skin off my nose, Aboujib ..."

"Roll him on his side," Sal said, gesturing at Dek and making a spinning motion with her hand. "In _g_ , you can't put him on his back, he could choke that way. First aid."

Meg knew she should have remembered that; wasn't tracking so good herself, it seemed like. She and Ben rolled Dek to the side, and she laid her hand against his neck and checked his pulse (it was okay, not too weak, not too slow), gave him a quick pat-down for any signs of broken bones or bleeding anywhere else (nada) and then gave herself a minute to stroke his hair back from his pale face before she stepped over him to crouch down beside Sal. 

"So you want to tell me what hurts this time in a little more detail?"

Sal huffed out a breath. "I think I sprained pretty much everything, but I don't know if it's worse than that. Knocked up my ribs tres bad on the back of the seat. Hell happened to your hand?"

"Broken fingers. Not gonna kill me."

"Doesn't look too comfortable, for sure." Sal raised her head, with a wince. "Let me see that."

Meg held out her hand. Sal grasped it firmly and set her thumbs against Meg's swollen knuckles, then pressed sharply. Meg sucked in her breath and tried to yank her hand away, but Sal's grip was unyielding.

"Ow! What the hell, Sal, I'm not a stuck bolt --"

"Quiet down, had to deal with this a couple of times down on Helldeck, before you and me hooked up. Bust up a hand, floating around in zero- _g_ ... happens a lot, and you can't always pay to run updeck to a med to fix it. Not like our cushy, cushy life on the good ol' _Norway."_

Meg snorted a laugh that got her through the rush of pain as Sal did whatever manipulation she was doing to the dislocated knuckles. She waited out the nausea -- doing pilot work gave a girl a lot of experience controlling her stomach -- and then flexed her hand cautiously. It was still swollen and hurt like hell, but she could move her fingers a little.

"Careful with those," Sal muttered, sinking back against the wall. "Ligaments an' shit are stretched to hell. You oughta tape 'em, if there's a kit around anywhere."

"Why the hell would there be? Doesn't look like anybody thought out the possibility of us not getting back to Mama _Norway_. There's two possibilities on a rider, you wipe out in a blaze of glory or you shoot your ordnance and go home like a good duckling." She sighed and slumped against the bulkhead next to Sal. "I don't think the possibility ever occurred to anybody that we might get sucked into a gravity well and live to tell the tale."

"Trust us," Sal said, and Meg laughed again, bleakly this time.

"Yeah, sure, just hang out and have a picnic over there while some of us are doing all the work," Ben said from under the console.

"I'll give him a hand," Sal said, and began to squirm her way painfully over to Ben, shaking off Meg's halfhearted attempt to stop her. "Before he throws a temper tantrum about us ignoring him."

"Not really sure I can help you two, so I'll see what we got in emergency gear, if anything," Meg suggested.

What they had was, as Sal in her cynicism had pointed out, not a whole hell of a lot. The most useful thing Meg found was the kit for going through jump in case they had to do it in the rider. Nutrient packs and trank doses, and lots of 'em.

"You think trank works as a painkiller?" Meg asked, sitting crosslegged and squinting at the fine print on the folded dosage slip, inches from her eyes with the helmet light cocked at an angle.

"You _know_ what it does," Sal said from somewhere in the guts of the boards she and Ben had pulled apart. "It'll stop you from feeling pain, for sure. See you three weeks later."

"I don't think it takes you down that long if you aren't actually going through jump."

"Yeah? Want to try it?" Sal groaned and stretched out her legs. "Ugh, I forgot how much I hate trying to get into maintenance access in _g._ Someone spin down the world, I want to get off."

"Take a break, you two. Get some fuel in you." Meg passed two of the hydration packs across Dekker's inert body. The go-packs were mostly sugar, juice, and vitamins, probably a decent substitute for food in a survival situation.

Sal and Ben wiggled out of the tangle of boards and wires, and they all took a break, silent in the shadows of the rider's cabin. Meg shifted Dek's head into her lap, not that it really did him much good, but it made her feel better, a little.

It was really quiet here. _Really_ quiet. She didn't know quite how to deal with it. She wasn't sure if she'd experienced this kind of quiet in her entire life. Certainly not lately. There was always the hum of engines and life support, compressors and electronics, distant clanging and banging of the other people you shared living space with, all the million little sounds that went into the functioning of a station or a ship.

This was just ... silence, oppressive and deep, like the endless quiet black between the stars. It made her feel like she was already dead.

The worst part was not knowing where they were, how they'd landed. They could be buried in mud, could be underwater or sitting in a meadow. Could have set the grass on fire around them when they'd come in hot, and they wouldn't know. _Couldn't_ know, because they couldn't open the ship to find out without sacrificing all the air they still had inside.

"Won't kill you right away, the Downbelow air," she said after a little while. "We can breathe it, for a time anyway. If we have to."

"Ray of sunshine," Ben said dryly.

"Saying facts, Pollard. Just that."

"Blue sky optimism," Sal said.

"It's not that, it's just ... we're not dead yet." Meg tilted her head back against the wall and combed her fingers through Dek's hair, dried into stiff spikes with caked-on sweat and blood. 

 

***

 

They took turns working on the boards and (without ever precisely discussing it) babysitting Dekker; not that there was anything they could've done, Meg thought, if he _did_ have a medical emergency of some kind, but it didn't seem right to just leave him laying there.

Working on the boards was difficult and cramped, and none of them were at their best right now. Meg thought she might be the healthiest out of all of them, but her injured hand made it agonizing to try to crimp and bend tiny wires, and anyway, compared to Ben and Sal, she had little knowledge of what she was looking at in there. Ben was clearly concussed, not that he'd admit it, and Sal wouldn't even talk about what was wrong with her -- mostly a lot of sprains and strains, Meg was pretty sure, but it could be something worse, and it obviously hurt her a lot to be doubled up in the cramped positions that it took to get access to the innards of the ship's control panels.

"So, hey, what exactly did happen up there?" Sal spoke up, a little too loud. Meg thought she wasn't the only one having trouble coping with the eerie silence. 

"I told you," Ben said. "EMP." Currently on Dekker-sitting duty, he had his back against the wall and Dekker's head pillowed on his thigh, his hands full of a snarl of wires and electronics that he was trying to cobble together into some kind of functional radio setup. Meanwhile Meg handed things to Sal so that Sal didn't have to crawl out of a tangle of wires and boards every time she needed a tool.

"Yeah," Sal said from somewhere inside the console, "that helps me not at all."

"It's a planetary effect," Meg said. "Atmosphere."

"Yeah," Ben said. "Missile blowing up in hard vacuum doesn't do much as long as it misses you. In atmo, though -- and we _were_ in it, upper part of it at least -- it does all kinds of stuff, electromagnetic surges and shockwaves and the like. Basically the ship got fried and the power surge fed back into our suits. ... I think. Hold this?"

Meg twisted around to grip two wires for him, but lost interest in _that_ completely when Dekker stirred, groaned, and tried to twist to the side.

"Oh, hey, look who's awake," Ben said. Dropping the half-finished thing he'd been building, he brought a hand down on Dekker's chest, stopping him when he tried to sit up. "Only slightly brain-damaged, but no one is going to notice."

"Shut up, Pollard," Dekker mumbled, his eyes screwed half shut. 

"He's awake?" Sal said, thrashing her way out of the console. "Dek? You in there? Sounds like him."

"I think he is." Meg bent over him, took his face in her hands. He blinked at her. "Dek? Cher?"

"My head. Ow. Where am I?" He squinted painfully up at her. "We're alive. Are we alive? Meg?"

"I'm here. We're all here. You're the last to wake up." She kissed him quickly, tasting the copper tang of blood on his lips. "Don't try to sit up just yet. You feeling sick? Think you could drink something?"

"Uh ... yeah?" Dekker mumbled, ambiguously, but he took the nutrient pack when she shoved it into his hands.

"Hey!" Sal crowed, as a whole row of lights flickered to life on the console above her head. "Looks like things are finally going right for a change."

Ben leaned forward, pushing Dekker off onto Meg. "What've you got?"

"Uh ... basic functions, not sure. Give me a hand?"

Meg slid out of the way and got her arms around Dekker. Just could stay this way for awhile, she felt. He was no longer deadweight, awkwardly hugging her back.

"You hurting anywhere?" she asked him.

"Don't ask." He huffed out a sigh against her neck. The nutrient pack slipped out of his limp hand. "Where are we? Still in the _Freya?"_

"Yeah, we're in the _Freya;_ we're also on Downbelow."

"You're kidding."

"Would I joke about that? We rode it out, crashed down here. Still figuring out what we're going to do about it."

"And you're all okay," Dekker said into her neck, sounding like he was trying to convince himself.

"We're all okay. You're the one we were worried about."

"Who's worried?" Ben said from under the console. "Sal, push that _up._ Guys, I think we can get a distress signal going here. Question is, who's gonna come to pick us up?"

There was a brief, tense silence. In the scramble to survive, Meg had managed to all but forget that they had no idea how the battle had gone after they went down. If Fleet picked them up, they might as well just die down here. It'd be the same outcome either way.

"We don't have a choice," she said at last. "It's gamble on this, or stay down here 'til we die -- and we all know we've got a limited amount of air in here." She felt a shudder run through Dekker, pressed up against her; this situation had to be bringing back bad memories.

"Devil we know or the devil we don't," Sal said.

 

***

 

With the distress signal up and running, there wasn't a lot else to do. Sal and Ben were still trying to get a functional radio working, to receive if nothing else; they might be able to get a handle on how the battle was going, and some idea of what to expect.

When something jolted the ship, Sal yelped and Meg dropped the hydration pack she'd just pulled out of their dwindling supply. Loose items slid across the floor, bouncing around in _g,_ including the helmets they were using for light. For a disorienting moment, the interior of the ship's cockpit was a crazy jumble of dancing shadows. Even Dekker woke up at that.

"What in the hell was that!" Sal said.

Something knocked sharply and repetitively against the hull of the ship. Meg braced herself, realizing with sudden clarity that they had no weapons. Why bother arming rider crews? There was next to no chance of ever being boarded. She saw that the others seemed to have had similar thoughts; they'd all drawn closer together, even in this small space, as if it made any difference if they were about to be torn apart by a mob or marched off for execution. She put a protective arm around Dekker. Sal's hip and arm bumped against hers.

"Hey," Ben said suddenly, tilting his head to the side. "That's Morse code."

Meg had had to learn it to get her pilot's license, back on Sol, what seemed like a lifetime ago; she tried to dredge it out of the depths of her brain. Sal was listening now too. Dekker merely looked frustrated.

Sal and Ben both broke into sudden grins, and Sal said, "It's _Norway!_ Anyone got something to tap back --"

They ended up having an awkward conversation, banging on the ship's bulkhead with a detached console panel, that Meg only understood part of and Dekker clearly understood none of, with Sal and Ben's not-always-helpful translations. The gist of it was, though, they'd gone down on the far side of the planet from the Downbelow settlement, and _Norway_ was working out how to get them out and back up to the ship.

Which meant _Norway_ was still there.

Which meant they'd ... won?

Or survived, at least. Maybe that was the only kind of victorious outcome that a battle like this could have.

 

***

 

The _Norway's_ medbay was overflowing with casualties, people who'd gotten knocked around in the ship's sudden vector changes as well as troopers injured in the fighting. With the place as much of a madhouse as it was, Meg secured some painkillers and got her fingers taped, Dek got a quick look-over to make sure he wasn't about to drop dead of an aneurysm, and then they retreated to quarters. They passed Almarshad's crew along the way, looking tired to death. There were quick hugs and back-slaps all around. "Damn," Almarshad said, glancing around the bruised and bloodied _Freya_ crew, "you bunch are beat to hell and back again."

"You try falling into a gravity well and see how _you_ like it."

"Well, you want food, the mess is down, same as when we're running up to a jump, but there's sandwiches. Better get 'em before they're gone. With the supply situation the way it is right now, there's rumors we'll be on short rations soon, and no telling for how long."

Meg went down to do that, after seeing the rest (and more disastrously beat up) of her team into quarters. The atmosphere along the way was ... ambiguous. No one seemed to know if they should be celebrating a battle won, or staying alert for future battles, or just collapsing in sheer exhaustion. She also had to field congratulations and well wishes and a few crew members who had somehow come out of it with the idea that the _Freya_ had been blown up and were surprised to see her alive. By the time she grabbed a stack of sandwiches and escaped, she was ready to hide out in quarters for awhile.

Ben and Sal both looked like they'd just gotten out of the shower, tousled and damp in fresh clothes, which only made the bruises and abrasions stand out more glaringly. They were sitting on the floor in the common room of the rider-crew suite, doctoring each other's scrapes. Dek, still looking like twenty miles of bad road, was asleep or passed out on the couch.

"Food," Meg declared, dropping the sandwiches on the fold-down table. She nudged Dekker. "Hey, boy. Want to take a shower with me? Or eat?"

"Ngghh," was Dekker's articulate response.

"What'd the meds say is wrong with him, anyway?" Sal asked. Meg had sat in on Dek's exam; Sal and Ben hadn't.

"I don't think even they know. They said to bring him back if he has seizures or we can't wake him up. Otherwise ..." She tugged on Dekker's hand. "Come on. Up. Get you clean and warm. Do wonders for your state of mind."

"It's the state of my head I'm more worried about," he mumbled, but he let her tow him along.

"Headache?"

"Not too bad. I just want to sleep."

She got him in the shower and got the cycle going. There was just enough room for two people in there, as they'd all had more than enough time to discover during a long, long tour on the _Norway_ \-- a lot longer than any of them signed on for.

"You hear anything out there?" Dek asked as she scrubbed his hair clean with handfuls of soap. There was still hot water, and it wasn't even rationed, so she figured she'd take it while they had it. "What's going on, I mean. With Fleet."

"I don't know. It'll be what it'll be, I guess."

Dekker looked troubled ... and young, with the soft light inside the shower enclosure washing out the fine lines around his eyes and the gray in his hair.

"Hey, cher," she murmured, running her fingers through his wet hair. "Look at what we've lived through. All of us. Could be fragged tomorrow, we don't know. But we're here today, we're alive, we made it through another thing that should have killed us. Let tomorrow take care of itself."

He sighed, and leaned against her, the strength going out of him. She let the shower cycle just long enough to wash the rest of the soap off them and then turned it off.

The lights were down in the common room; Ben and Sal's door was shut. Meg herded Dek into their closet-sized bedroom and they collapsed into the lower bunk together. She had just enough sense remaining to pull the restraint web over them; it was enough of a habit to all but perform in her sleep now.

Dek curled against her, fitting skin to skin, and she leaned into him. From next door came a thump, and she rolled her eyes. _Some_ people weren't sleeping, but then, some people's bed partners weren't half fried and more than half asleep already. Anyway, she was no kid herself, and while she wasn't averse to an energetic roll in their bunk, she also didn't have a single problem with some quiet cuddling after a day like the one they'd just had.

Though sex would've helped stop her from thinking. It was easy to tell Dek not to worry about tomorrow, harder to put that advice into practice herself.

She tucked her face against his damp hair and wondered if it was worth banging on the too-thin wall to tell Ben and Sal to keep it down in there.

Not like they hadn't kept her awake before, though. She was glad they were having fun, the inconsiderate jerks. 

She drifted, trying to tune out the sounds from next door and noticing, instead, how the planet's deathly silence had been replaced with the ever-present background soundtrack of life on the _Norway_ , the engines' low vibration and the footsteps and voices outside in the corridor. She'd long since gotten to the point where she didn't even notice it, just like you could fall asleep on Helldeck back in the glory days, with a 24/7 party raging outside. You just got used to things.

 _Norway_ wasn't meant to be home, back when she'd signed on, or more accurately when she got drawn into its gravitational pull, sucked down into a war she never wanted to be part of. But she didn't know the shape of home, not exactly. Didn't know what that should look or feel like. You didn't leave your world behind if there was something to go back to.

So maybe home was people. Maybe home was this: wound up tight in Dekker's arms, with restraints buckled over her and her goddamn selfish partners having their own little party next door. And maybe, just maybe, the end of this never-ending war was in sight, and they'd somehow made it. And what was beyond that, well ... 

_That's for tomorrow, not today._

She burrowed deeper under the covers with Dekker, and slept.

**Author's Note:**

> This is actually, very slightly, at odds with what happens in the book, because there's a brief reference at the end of the fight to Mallory having all four riderships back in formation around _Norway_. It's very blink-and-you-miss-it; I didn't notice 'til I'd already written most of this. Let's say it's a slight AU.
> 
> The name of their ridership ( _Freya_ ) and _Norway's_ other riderships is information in the author's notes to the ebook edition of _Hellburner._
> 
> Apparently EMPs (electromagnetic pulses that can be associated with atomic bomb and missile explosions) are an atmosphere-only phenomena -- that is, while sources are somewhat ambiguous, they don't happen in pure vacuum -- which I didn't even know until I researched it with the intent of knocking out their ship that way. [Here's one source on that.](http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2000-12/976201701.Ph.r.html) This made it work even better than I was hoping for their situation, because it's a danger they wouldn't even know to look out for.


End file.
